Travel Journal

We're off on our family vacation at the end of next week. I can't wait. This year we are flying out to Seattle, Washington and then spending 10 days doing some road tripping and exploring.

I spent yesterday inside with the AC running because it was pretty hot outside. I put together my travel journal for the trip. I had started the cover- painted it, and then I rubbed some brown ink over it to get rid  of a bit of the brightness and give it more of an older distressed look.
I hand painted the picture in the middle of the mountain. Not sure Mount Rainier or Mount Hood or any of the mountains we will see will look like my mountain, but it does look abstractly like Mount Shasta in Northern California- which is part of the same Cascade Mountain chain. So maybe. I didn't spend a lot of time trying to get all the mountain details exact, but I still am happy with the way it works on the cover. For the forest around the mountain I just brushstroked lines of green in 3 different shades-that part kind of works. All the rest of the cover is stickers I scavenged from my stash. I used to be a big scrapbooker. I actually like to scrapbook-my pages always look more journaly than the typical scrapbook page. I just haven't done as much scrapping as when my daughter was little because I've discovered how much I LOVE to play with paints, stencils and stamps.

Here is my inside cover.  I used the same green and blue paint to cover all of the cardboard pages within the book. This is a Maya Road book I picked up with a 4 ring inner binder to hold pages. It came with a lot of these bulky pages, which I like, but didn't want to use throughout the whole journal.  I used one at each end and then added one in the middle and made my own pages for the inside. Some of my inner pages are just cut pieces of paper, and some are pages I had (also from scrapbooking) that just needed some slight fixing. I also added some envelopes for pages and even a small flat paper bag I had. When I make a journal like this I often hit my stash a lot. You can see that here also. I love the saying above the word July. I recently picked up this set of travel stamps from Technique Tuesday and I think this is my favorite one in the set.

While cleaning out my classroom at the end of the year I came across a bunch of old slides that a retired teacher had had and his replacement had decided to throw away. I grabbed a bunch, not that I can use them in my classroom but figured they would make great embellishments on pages. That's where this little piece of film came from that I used on this page.

An October Afternoon page I had in my stash that I sprayed with ink, added the star, stickers and little cardboard dots (also from my stash).

Not the clearest photo, but you can see some of slides I brought home from work. Thought I would put them to use here.

A couple more fixed over pages for the journal. I have a lot of blank pages in this book and these half done pages too. I need to be able to actually keep the trip journal once we are there!  I will fill in and add things while we travel and then finish up the book once I am home. I bring my supplies- pens, Sharpies, a glue-stick, double side tape roll, scissors and a hole punch, in a little metal lunch box that goes right into my suitcase. It is amazing how little you can actually work with and how many periphery items you manage to accumulate at home when you don't need to keep it to a minimum.

One last page to show you. (Sorry this has been a long post today!) I know we will make it to at least 1 air and space museum in our travels, because my husband is really into that kind of thing. There are 2 he is talking about visiting, so maybe I will need more than this page. I just used some paper from my stash and these embellishments from my stash. Most pages I can't start to fix up since I am never exactly sure what it is we will end up doing.

Ok, time to take a breath and give my fingers a rest.

Thanks for stopping by.